I can add two more.
My wife and I did a house sit in South Carolina, and the owners had a Mercedes 500 series and a Cadillac, both mid-seventies, bought new about six months apart, the Mercedes cost almost three times as much as the Caddy. They both had about 155,000 miles on them when we were there, and the Caddy was on the go regularly, because the Mercedes was always broke down. if it wasn't the transmission, it was the electrics, and then the timing chain broke, and that cost another $1800. Meanwhile, the Caddy had had nothing but routine maintenance, and was still going strong. Mercedes and the like are really good, for about six or seven years, and then look out.
Thanks, I'll take a Ford or a Chevy and an Olympus or a Canon any day.

And let's not foget the GM Diesel of roughly the same era.By the way, what were the maintenance histories of those two cars?

A friend has as a regular driver a 1963 Mercedes 220 Sb, something like 160,000 miles on the engine I rebuilt in 1995 at 280-something thousand. Beyond regular maintenance he has had no problems with it.